Apple Expands Its System Status Page To Be More Comprehensive, Tracks Services, Stores And iCloud

Apple is still pretty new to the cloud computing and storage game – and sometimes it shows. The company’s various iCloud services have been suffering from numerous outages lately, but thanks to the company’s new System Status Page, which it quietly rolled out today, its users will at least be able to get a comprehensive view of how Apple’s online services are doing.

The new status page replaces the older text-heavy one Apple launched earlier this year with a more detailed view of the status of all of Apple’s services, stores and iCloud applications. Green squares indicate that all systems are working; orange triangles indicate an issue.

Unlike Google, Apple doesn’t differentiate between service disruptions and outages on the new status page, but it does often offer exact percentages of the number of affected users in its explanations.

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The key feature here, however, is the timeline feature at the bottom of the page. It’s here that you can find more detailed reports of all the outages. Today, for example, 2.15 percent of Mail users were unable to access the service between 10:34 a.m. and 10:54 a.m. and some users weren’t able to access iCloud Documents, Photo Stream and Backup & Restore around 11 a.m., too. For the time being, the new timeline only goes back until December 11.

What’s maybe more interesting than just this new status page, though, is the fact that Apple is getting quite a bit more transparent about communicating these issues to its customers. After all the recent outages, that’s definitely the right step to take.